Coverage

Website Publishing Platform Digs Deeper Into Analytics

New York City-based Squarespace, best knows for its website publishing platform, is taking a deeper dive into e-commerce with the release of an upgraded analytics application.

It's new analytics dashboard fulfills promises of deeper metrics it made last year when it introduced Squarespace Commerce, which the company specifically designed for merchants on Squarespace that are focused on building robust e-commerce businesses.

The new Advanced Analytics for Commerce offers insights into which websites, social networks and channels are driving interest and sales, and also offers explanations why customers abandon carts without buying. The dashboard includes seven key performance indicators (KPIs) — revenue, units sold, conversion rate, average order volume and revenue per visit — that collectively aim to provide an instant overview of e-commerce health.

'Powering Merchant Success'

"Providing insights into how their businesses are doing and surfacing opportunities for growth are key components to powering merchant success," Natalie Gibralter, director of product at Squarespace, told CMSWire.

Squarespace was founded in 2003 and launched in January 2004 with a SaaS-based content management system (CMS) integrated with a website builder, blogging platform, hosting service and website analytics.

In 2014, it underwent a redesign, which appeared for the first time in version 6. It offered new Cover Pages, Getty Images integration, Google Apps integration and 15 new website templates.

The company has raised a total of $78.5 million in two funding rounds, the most recent $40 million in April 2014.

It also offers deeper functionality, including a panel that displays a purchase funnel, allowing merchants to better understand where drop-off occurs and what they can do to improve their conversion rates.

“We also show a detailed breakdown of visits, revenue, conversion rate and other KPIs by traffic source, giving merchants the information they need to make decisions around where to allocate their marketing dollars more strategically,” she said.

The Device Filtering function, for example, identifies buying trends and filters performance metrics by mobile, tablet, desktop or other to help merchants better understand how visitors using different devices interact with their businesses.

“This helps businesses delve into the performance of their purchase funnel, marketing channels and more by device, and glean insights into how their business is doing on mobile versus desktop,” she said.

This all addresses what is currently on of the biggest challenges for e-commerce retailers, notably the shift to shopping from mobile devices and improving conversion rates amount those shoppers.

“We’ve got a lot more in the pipeline for Squarespace Analytics across all of our product lines and we’ll also be adding many more advanced features to our Commerce product over the coming months,” Gibralter said.